Man Ray duck-walked past Jonny to the rear of the van and removed one of the side panels, jellied glycerin rolling in sluggish waves. From a storage area, he removed a Medusa, something like an electrified cat o' nine tails, and some smaller gear, pistols and bolos, which he handed to the Croakers. Over the Guru's shoulder, Jonny could see a whole rack of colorful and oddly outfitted weapons. 'See anything you like?' Man Ray asked.
'I'm fine,' said Jonny.
Man Ray looked disappointed. 'You got this bad prosaic streak, you know?'
The rain had given way to wind-driven mist. Ice moved ahead of them in a loping trot, Skid doggedly at her side. Jonny did not try to catch up, preferring to let her cope with the ghosts in her own way.
Twisted winds whipped the mist into tiny vortices in the lee of an enormous tent-like structure. One hundred meters high and covering almost sixty square blocks, a perverse relic, it was the single still-standing structure from the Los Angeles-Tokyo Exposition, held to celebratethe one hundredth anniversary of the transistor.
It was a series of tents, really, two hundred and eighty of them, each half an acre of Teflon-coated fiberglass, all mildewed and leaking badly. Beneath the tents were three life-size thermoplast and concrete reconstructions that had comprised the Golden Age of Hollywood Pavilion: Robin Hood's castle, sporting a peeling metallic caricature that might once have resembled Errol Flynn; the Emerald City from The Wizard of Oz and the Babylonian temple from D.W. Griffith's Intolerance. Jonny lived in the last of these reconstructions, as did two thousand other people.
At a service port near the bottom of a support pylon, Jonny pried a ten key pad away from its housing. Sumi had set the pad there loosely, with a gummy brown adhesive, after instructing him how to short out the locking mechanism. With a thunk, the port slid open and the five of them entered, climbing quickly up a spiral staircase to a slimy platform at the top. Jonny shorted out a second pad and a moment later, they were out onto the translucent surface of the tent itself.
Jonny motioned for them to spread out, to keep the tent fabric from sagging under their weight. Above their heads, suspended in slings and plastic bubbles were the lost tribes of Los Angeles.
Any permanent or semi-permanent structure in the city was an invitation to squatters. In the years since its construction, the Hollywood Pavilion had served as home to thousands of local down-and-outers, illegals from Mexico and Jamaica, indentured workers from Thailand and the Ukraine. A few of those one-percenters, the ones who had found the life below too confining or too desperate, had moved to the open spaces above the tents themselves, wandering like nomads across the billowing fiberglass dunes. Years later, tribes hunted, whole societies had sprung up with their own customs and languages. Jonny watched Man Ray and Skid taking it all in, eyeing the delicate habitats with a combination of fascination and nervousness. Groucho waved happily to the fleeting figures shadowing them along the cables. On the dripping wires were hung tribal banners, crude Catholic shrines, prayer flags marked with curious symbols resembling Mayan, Nepalese and parts of schematic diagrams, cabalistic cries for help directed at any god or gods who might be listening.
Jonny felt in control here. He was gripped by a strange combination of tension and elation. His mind raced. He found himself staring at the moon as it appeared from behind a cloud bank. He thought of the Alpha Rats. Again, he wondered if somewhere on that airless surface they were watching all this, noting it for some future inquiry. He had the sudden urge to meet them, to somehow explain things to them. At that same moment, he thought of Sumi down below, unaware of his and Ice's presence. His senses expanded outward until they encompassed the whole of the saddle-backed landscape. This is right, he thought; it was good to be moving again.
He felt as if he had regained some lost part of himself.
He broke ranks and scrambled to the crest of a corner dune. Its peak was a circular anchorage, open to the structure below. Quickly, he uncoiled lengths of nylon rope attached to the cement anchor and let them drop. Ice caught up with him, releasing other lines. She still would not look at him, but Jonny knew she was feeling a high similar to his. Climbing clumsily in his cast, he made it over the rim and dropped with Ice to a ledge beside a Babylonian elephant deity, its chicken wire frame visible through the cracked concrete. The others dropped down a moment later. A tangle of echoing voices from below made it impossible to hear; Jonny signed for them to follow him inside.
They moved through a series of packed gray rooms, dusty storage areas for the concession stands that had filled the pavilion during the expo. They entered a clearing; around them, half-empty crates trailed shreds of Taiwanese gun catalogs (improvised packing material) to rows of ceiling-high shelves crowded with miniature cowboy and samurai figures, still new in their plastic wrappers. Skid picked up souvenirs as he walked along: Hollywood Boulevard sealed in a water filled-lucite bubble; when he shook it, plastic snow settled over the buildings; paper jackets emblazoned with the Rising Sun; candy in the shape of silicon chips. Except for a layer of dust, most of the merchandise seemed to have changed very little over the years.
Wall-sized holograms of Uncle Sam and Disney characters, dreams figures of an extinct culture, were carefully sealed in bubble pack and duct tape, waiting for their owners to return from other errands.
They came to a flight of stairs. Jonny lead them down a couple of levels, then up one, careful to keep to the deserted areas of the structure. They saw yellow signs in a dozen languages warning them not to smoke, pointing out fire exits and giving long and detailed explanations of local hygiene laws.
From below drifted the smell of bodies pressed close together, cooking fires, mildew and something else, the almost metallic scent of nervous action. Strange insect odors of commerce, shady deals, strictly off-the-record meetings. They came upon a young girl kneeling in the corridor, bathed in the blue light of an ancient portable television, tying off with a hachimaka. When she saw them, the girl gathered up her works and took off. She left the television, which was slowly rolling a dead channel of snow. At the junction of four corridors, Ice signed for Jonny to take the rear entrance of the apartment, while she took Skid and Groucho to check out the front.
Jonny gave her the acknowledging sign and with Man Ray, started down the corridor to his right. Half-way down, they entered a room of immense asbestos-wrapped standing pipes.
'Help me get this up,' whispered Jonny, indicating a textured metal plate in the floor. 'We're right above the apartment.'
The two of them stooped, worked their fingers under the plate and lifted it free. Jonny went feet-first into the hole, kicking out the plastic louvers of a false ventilating duct, and dropped to the floor of the apartment. A moment later, he heard Man Ray hit the floor behind him.
The room was dark, the air dead and hot; it clung to Jonny, bitter with the fumes of charred synthetics.
A mass of broken furniture lay scattered across the floor, blistered seat backs and pressboard chair legs forming the ribs of some skinned animal. Small appliances seemed to have been thrown into a pile and methodically smashed. Jonny had trouble identifying individual objects, he could make out a coffee grinder and a small microwave oven; the rest of it was unrecognizable, beaten beyond recognition. Someone had placed duct tape over the room's only window. To hide what they were doing, he thought. The tape was peeling off now, the pavilion's floods cutting the far wall into neat diagonal segments, alternating bands of light and dark. Pills and diskettes crunched beneath their feet, giving off a sour reek of spoiled hormonal extracts; an Indian throw rug was gummy with half-dissolved capsules of vasopressin and prolactin. There did not seem to be much in the room that was not burned or broken.
They followed a trail of books and Sumi's gutted electronic gear (fused circuits glowing like raw opals) down the hall to the bedroom.
In the small chamber, the arson-smell was stronger. Man Ray thumbed on a small squeeze light attached to his obi. The bed had been torched. Shredded clothes were scattered over the floor, and Freon slurred the wall from a refrigeration unit, now slag, that Jonny had hidden to store perishable drugs, and the occasional blackmarket kidney or lung for a client.
A scraping. From the living room.
Both men had their weapons up and out, Jonny leaning into the hall, anxious for something to shoot. In the far room, Ice and the others were silently surveying the wreckage on the floor.
'Back here,' Jonny called.
They came back, huddling dumbly in the doorway. Ice performed a slow motion sleepwalk through the bedroom, stopping occasionally to finger a piece of clothing, a crushed circuit board, vials of pills. Man Ray's light fixed her in a wedge of sudden color.
She turned to Jonny. 'Her tool belt is gone,' Ice said.
'That's good,' said Groucho hopefully. 'Then there's a chance Sumi got away.'
Jonny leaned against the wall, sliding down into a crouch. 'And maybe they just took it with them for
